Getting Fedora Survey Results

Many respondents gave multiple answers to questions. I counted every answer – I did not limit each respondent to one answer. Maybe this means using pie charts is bogus (I’m open for other recommendations!) But consider that the percentages are percentages of the total responses, which is greater than the number of total respondents (78) so when you’re reading it, don’t think “5% of respondents only do this” think “5% of respondents do this, and they might do other things as well.”

I tallied everything manually, copying from the blog post comments to an OO.o spreadsheet. I’m sure there’s manual errors. With 78 respondents though hopefully it all rounds out.

A few respondents mentioned they are primarily Ubuntu or other distro users but download Fedora during a new release to see the new technology.

Several people noted they like to download the bare minimum, the initrd and boot image or whatnot, because they’d rather install things they need on demand than have them waste HDD space and potentially never get used.

A few respondents mentioned they get the LiveMedia strictly for showing off / demoing.

One respondent pointed out he gets one each of GNOME and KDE Live Media.

A couple people mentioned braveness being involved in preupgrading. Also some mentioned they’d like to use preupgrade but for various reasons couldn’t.

A lot more people upgrade via yum than I thought would.

One person pointed out they go to get.fpo specifically because they know a KDE link isn’t elsewhere.

Here’s my work produced during this:

The ODF spreadsheet used to tally the results and generate the graphs. (244K OpenOffice.org Calc ODS file)

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About Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape. You can read more from Máirín on her blog at blog.linuxgrrl.com.

Discussion

17 thoughts on “Getting Fedora Survey Results”

I’m really looking forward for the follow-up to see your interpretations of the data. I know the results are biased towards contributors (those reading your blog via aggregators) and may not be representative for “normal” users, but Fedora is targeted at contributors, right?

Honestly, I didn’t do that much! OO.o definitely doesn’t make it easy. I had to take screenshots of the charts in OO.o, crop them in Gimp, then in Inkscape I added the title and the labels for each pie slice. OO.o already makes the pie look pretty slick; I just couldn’t figure out an OO.o way to label it the way I wanted.

@Nicu – you know, I tried desperately to figure out how to do that, and I couldn’t find it so I gave up. I even tried exporting to PDF and opening that in Inkscape but OO.o PDF export is fail as it cut off most of the charts. :(

Actually OOo suck at his… you have to create the chart in Calc, make it 2D (as Draw can’t use 3D objects), copy, open Impress, paste, admire the ugliness and use Export, where you can select SVG (a SVG which will not make Inkscape happy).

Well Luya, contributors are the *primary* target of Fedora. I fully agree it *must* be more and more friendly to “normal” users, I as a contributor myself want most of the time nice things that “just works”.

But I also remember how Mo was flamed by known Fedora developers when she posted frontpage redesign mockups for being too friendly for “normal” users…

As Nicu pointed out, I would love to see some segmenting of this data not only by user type, but also by geographic location, speed of internet, age, gender, etc, etc. Because a quick reading of this would support promoting the DVD over any other type of image. This is probably an incorrect choice because a higher percentage of all Fedora users, as opposed to those who filled out the survey, would prefer a CD over a DVD because DVD burners are still not all that common and DVDs are more expensive.